Homily for the Memorial of Saint John Paul II

October 22, 2024
Saint John Paul II Catholic Church
Denton, Texas

Isaiah 52:7-10
Psalm 96:1-2a, 2b-3, 7-8a, 10
John 21:15-17

We celebrate the Memorial of Saint John Paul II, the patron saint of your parish, who was a friend to young adults throughout his ministry as a priest and particularly during his pontificate. He was the pope who inaugurated World Youth Day to bring young people together from around the world that they might know that they are not alone and that they should have courage to be proud of their faith so much as to share it always. So often, Saint John Paul II repeated the words of Jesus in many places in the Gospel, “Be not afraid!” It is in seeking this saint’s intercession that I come to you as a friend and as your bishop.

We see a different image of Saint Peter in today’s Gospel reading than the image of Peter we see in the Gospel that is read on Good Friday. Saint Peter, who denied Christ three times in fear, now professes his love for Jesus. The Gospel for today’s Mass depicts one of the Resurrection appearances of Jesus made to His Apostles. Remember that Peter had denied knowing Jesus three times on the night before the Crucifixion. The Jewish patterns of communication used the triple repetition of anything to symbolize the superlative — so the denial of Jesus by Peter is the worst denial among all the other disciples who denied Him especially given how close Peter was to Jesus. So, in the scene from today’s Gospel, Jesus has just eaten breakfast with His Apostles when He turns to Peter and asks him three times if Peter loves Him.

The appearance of Jesus in the Upper Room has already included the gift of the Holy Spirit for the forgiveness of sins, but the particular sins of Peter still had to be resolved especially given the role that Jesus had entrusted Peter to hold in the life of the Church. Jesus asks Peter if he loves Him more than these. The “these” refers to the tools and life of fishing which Peter had loved and to which Peter had returned after denying Jesus. After each profession of love by Peter, Jesus gives him a particular mission for his flock: to feed His lambs, to tend His sheep, and to feed His sheep. This signifies the threefold office of the Pope’s ministry as the Successor of Peter and to a lesser degree the office of the Bishop as a Successor of the Apostles: to teach, to govern, and to sanctify. That is, to teach the true Faith, to oversee the flock with Hope, and to sanctify God’s people with Charity.

To understand more deeply the life of Saint John Paul II and the significance for us today of his ministry as a Successor of Saint Peter requires some background. In 1815, after the destruction of war brought on by Napoleon, the Congress of Vienna divided the Duchy of Warsaw (modern day Poland) into three parts: one to be ruled by the Emperor of Austria, the second to be ruled by the King of Prussia, and the third to be ruled by the Tsar of Russia. Between 1830 and 1832, there occurred a series of Nationalist uprisings in Poland against these monarchs. The native Polish hierarchy supported these uprisings and the nationalist sentiment of Catholic Poland especially in the face of the Lutheran King of Prussia and the Russian Orthodox Tsar.

The Emperor of Austria pressured Pope Gregory XVI, then the successor of Peter, to reprimand the Polish hierarchy. The successor of Peter sent the encyclical, Cum Primum, to the Polish hierarchy admonishing them to instruct their faithful that it was their responsibility to be obedient to the sovereignty of the Austrian Emperor, the Prussian King, and the Russian Tsar. Pope Gregory XVI as a temporal ruler had himself suppressed revolts in the Papal States with the help of Austrian troops, so he feared the destruction of the Church that he thought might come if the Pope were no longer to be the temporal ruler of Rome. The Pope cited Sacred Scripture in that encyclical letter to reinforce the Christian virtue of civil obedience as to be directed by the Poles to the Austrian Emperor, the Prussian King, and the Russian Tsar. This became known colloquially in Poland as the “Three-time Denial of Peter”.

These events prompted the Polish nationalist and poet, Julius Slowacki, to write in 1833 these prophetic words from his exile in Paris:

“God has made ready the throne for a Slav Pope, He will sweep out the churches and make them clean within, God shall be revealed, clear as day, in the creative world.

This Pope will not take flight at cannon’s roar and saber thrust

But — brave as God Himself — stand and give fight counting the world as dust.”

The Slav Pope, that Successor of Peter, was elected 145 years later in 1978. He was Karol Wojtyla, now known to us as Saint John Paul II.

This poem, and the national experience that it expresses, helped to shape the man who became Saint John Paul II, just as the events of our lives help to shape us. He was very aware of the weakness of Peter having studied the Gospel. He was very aware of the weakness of the Successor of Peter as he experienced that in his national identity as a Pole and as captured by the words of Slowacki. He was most acutely aware, in his vocation as the Successor of Peter, of his own need to be obedient to Christ alone in order to perfect the same human weakness within him.

Saint John Paul II often spoke of his responsibility to be obedient to the Gospel of Christ — that the Pope was not an earthly sovereign but the Vicar of Christ, and the Servant of the Servants of God. Saint John Paul II was obedient to the Gospel and could not change what is essential to the Gospel despite the criticism and attacks that were leveled at him because of his fidelity. It is this same obedience that prompted him to be able to ask forgiveness humbly for sins committed against others in the name of the Church, just as Saint Peter asked forgiveness of Jesus for his denial made in fear early on that first Good Friday. It is this understanding of obedience that prompted Saint John Paul II to preach that obedience should never be used as an excuse to commit evil in the name of any religion thereby perverting faith into an ideology for our own agenda.

The fruit of this faithful obedience of Saint John Paul II was his unwavering courage with fidelity to Sacred Scripture and the Authentic Tradition of the Church’s teaching. Saint John Paul II’s first decision as Pope was to be called by the name John Paul in order to continue the mission of his immediate predecessors Saint John XXIII and Pope Paul VI (and implicitly Pope John Paul I) towards the renewal of the Church initiated by Vatican II. As Saint John XXIII opened the windows of the Church for the winds to blow through, and Pope Paul VI suffered to keep the windows open against the gusts and to keep clear the Church’s authentic vision in the midst of the ensuing obscurity caused by the cloud of dust kicked up by the wind, Saint John Paul II continued this mission as he swept out the cloud of dust with its obscurity to make clean the Church from within so that its Gospel of Jesus might be proclaimed anew to all people inside and outside of the Church. 

This mission is entrusted to us. It is the mission of Christ Risen that conquers all fear and vanquishes sin through mercy. Let us ask Saint John Paul II to intercede for us that we might have the same courage to rely on Christ alone in our weakness, to keep Jesus as the center in our lives, and to have the courage to not be angry; to have the courage to not be selfish, to have the courage to say “yes” to Christ’s call whether that call be to priesthood, to married life, or to the life of a consecrated religious.